1. Effects of Reading on Word Learning
By: Haley Weaver

2. Introduction
Senior receiving a dual degree in Brain and Cognitive Science and Linguistics
Lab Involvement:
Worked with Adults on a task looking at multiple languages and attention
SEEDLINGS
Syracuse University Speech Production Lab
Rochester Baby Lab

3. Outline Research Project Mini-Lecture: Formulating Research Questions
Background Information
Methods
Results
Discussion
Preliminary Conclusions
Mini-Lecture: Formulating Research Questions

4. SEEDLingS: The Study of Environmental Effects on Developing Linguistic Skills
-46 infants from 6 to 18 months

5. Picture Book Study Banoona Shang Dax
- Sub study completed at either 10, 14, or 18 months

6. Research Questions
How does the quantity of speech input in reading compare to day to day interactions?
How does the input of goal oriented reading task differ from normal reading and does that impact language at 18 months?
How do parents interact with their child while performing a goal oriented reading task, and does that affect the word learning?

7. Background I Montag, Jones, and Smith (2015)
Text in books expose children to more unique words than normal day to day conversations
“With our data, we could not compute the true type-token ratios that a child might encounter in the text of picture books and in child-directed speech” (pg )

8. Background II
Liu (2014)
Using more words in isolation during picture book reading at 6-12 months is negatively correlated with language abilities at 5 years old
Using more “target words” in reading lead to lower language abilities at 5 years old

9. Background III 10 months 18 month
Isolated word input helps children learn word boundaries (Lew- Williams, Pelucchi, and Saffran, 2011)
Provides transitional probabilities
Children need variability in input
Learn words better when they are in sentence frames (Fernald and Hurtado, 2006)
Using higher order linguistic cues to learn words

10. Methods Read the picture book 2x a day for 2 weeks (28 recordings)
Eye-tracking:

11. Transcription Transcribe all nouns Utterance type Presence Speaker
Utterance types
R: reading
D: declarative
I: imperative
N: non-utterance
Q: question
S: singing
U: unsure
Basic Level: put everything in its most basic form (plurals go to singulars)

12. Results: Quantity of Input
Type= number of unique words
Token= total number of words heard
When a child hears more total words (tokens) they hear more unique words (types)
Type
Just video data:: sampling a random distribution of natural conversations
Count the number of types and tokens
Subset of 253 samples each dot is a subject at a particular month
Example: If a kid heard the word dog 50 times in an hour recording they would have a token count of 50, but a type count of 1
Reading and non-reading input have similar type-token trajectories
Token

13. Results: Hearing more total words in one input does not correlate to hearing more total words in another
Reading to Picture Book Reading
Reading to Non-reading
Picture Book Reading to Non-reading
Tokens in Picture Book
Tokens in Picture Book
Tokens in Reading
Kendall correlations
Reading to IDS: tau= .07
Reading to PB: tau= .03
PB to IDS: tau=.05
Tokens in Non-reading
Tokens in Picture Book
Tokens in Picture Book

14. Results: Utterance Types
Percent
d: declarative
i: imperative
n: non-utterance
q: question
r: reading
s: singing
u:unsure
Percentage of reading decreases with age
Percentage of non-utterances increases with age
Utterance Type

15. Preliminary Conclusions: Unique Words
Reading provides a similar number of unique types as natural IDS
hearing more words in reading or natural conversation does not seem to predict hearing more words in goal oriented reading
Differences in results in comparison to Montag and colleagues (2015):
data sampling
Books that parents read

16. Preliminary Conclusions: Utterance Type
Amount of reading seems to decrease with age
Amount of word use in isolation seems to increase with age
Differences in input may be the result of using novel words
Non-utterances allow one to one mapping between a lexical form and a visual representation
How does the percent of words heard in isolation relate to a child’s word learning?
Amount of reading
Maybe children are hearing the words in contexts other than reading
As children age parents tend to use more advanced conversation styles
Words in Isolation
Parents are trying to actively teach their children to the task they will perform
The eye tracking task maps tests that kids know if a lexical form goes with a specific exemplar
By using non-utterances it facilitates word-concept mapping

17. How do I find a research topic?
So I have data…
How do I find a research topic?

18. 1. Brainstorm What kinds of language ideas am I interested in?
Parental Input?
Word Learning?
Syntactic Structure Usage?

19. 2. Find a Paper Read some research papers that explore the topic
Can you use the corpus to answer any of the questions posed by the author?
Can you test the claims of the paper using the naturalistic data?
Different subject populations?

20. 3. Look at the Analysis
See if you could easily recreate some of the graphs in the paper you find
If not, look at the types of analysis used here